Eli Schiffhttp://www.elischiff.com/Tue, 24 Jul 2018 16:06:48 +0000en-USSite-Server v6.0.0-15031-15031 (http://www.squarespace.com)Interviewed on Great Technology StoryEli SchiffTue, 24 Jul 2018 16:11:26 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2018/7/24/interviewed-on-great-technology-story54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:5b574e988a922dbc8510e486I’ve just had the pleasure to be interviewed by the witty Simon Helyar of
Great Technology Story. He’s been pumping out amazing Apple satire. We
talked about buttons, the meaning of life, pig's blood and coffee shops,
among other things.

To start off, I want to say thank you to the many readers who made WWDC memorable this year.

And on to this week’s news—I’ve just had the pleasure to be interviewed by the witty Simon Helyar of Great Technology Story. He’s been pumping out amazing Apple satire. We talked about buttons, the meaning of life, pig's blood and coffee shops, among other things.

This has been a pretty insane week. It started with my posting a parody PSA about the "Bluecheck" phenomenon on Twitter (click through to the Twitter moment).

Several days later, I satirized the full-on journalist assault on Elon Musk...and Musk responded. I'm pretty sure he got the joke—can't be certain though. If you're friends with him, send him my way.

All that said, something even bigger is happening this coming week: I'll be visiting San Jose for WWDC-related festivities. I'll be attending sjMacIndie on Sunday evening, Various AltConf events starting Monday, and John Gruber's The Talk Show Live on Tuesday evening, among other things.

If you're in town, don't be afraid to say hello—I won't bite. Or reach out on Twitter.

]]>Star Wars: Death DriveEli SchiffWed, 27 Dec 2017 06:30:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/12/27/star-wars-death-drive54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:5a431a8871c10b3275f1d5c6Authority has long been absent in the entire galaxy, and promises to
continue to be under the postmodern and unserious Resistance. But the
modernist First Order, while interested in restoration, is equally
toothless, and run by fools.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

Last night I ventured out into the cold evening, and rushed to the movie theater. Though this tradition is feeling ever-more anachronistic with each passing year, one can't help but stay up to date with our American civic religion—spending hard-earned cash on the annual mind-numbing Disney flick. Marvel, Star Wars, Marvel, Star Wars, and next thing you know, you're dead.

I'd heard the plebs thought The Last Jedi was terrible. Film critics on the other hand thought it was a solid improvement over The Force Awakens. That said, when it came to the important things, critics didn't pull their punches. For instance, they held Adam Driver's torso aesthetics to account.

For my part, unexamined, The Last Jedi seemed entertaining enough—though my expectations weren’t high. Moreover, it satisfied the main criteria for movies in the current year—it panders to every possible demographic—with attending merchandise, it celebrates weakness and failure—which everyone can relate to, and condescends to its core fan base—a masochistic bunch who'll buy the merch anyway.

Sure, it was a bit heavy-handed in its moral prescriptions. But subtlety is out of fashion these days. Even Chewie couldn't get a break—to the delight of vegans worldwide, he was shamed by porgs for his virile meat-eating.

This is a porg, apparently.

Rian Johnson has been getting a lot of heat from fans for his Star Wars debut, but I contend that he is one of the few culturally conscious writers and directors of contemporary film. The Last Jedi casts the entire Star Wars series in a new light: as an allegory for the suicidal millenarianism of late American empire.

No longer is there the will to live, let alone dominate, that we saw in both the Rebels and Empire of the original series. No more is there a desire to maintain institutions or crush one’s enemies in galactic conquest, as there was in the prequels. In the sequels, it is the weak who inherit the galaxy, if only because they didn't get the memo on the glories of suicide. All that is left for the living are pyrrhic battles over deep-seated ressentiment—played out in the ruins of ancient civilizations. Even the presumed villain, Snoke, turns out to be a paper tiger. Nothing is coherent anymore.

Where the audience is inclined to underestimate the ramshackle protagonists, they're right. While the narrative overtly chastises you for this presumption, with a series of 'gotcha' moments that reveal the supposed competence of Resistance, the truth is belied by the results of the Resistance's 'successes.' Each battle surpasses the last as a more egregious loss of life, yet is more often than not hailed as a victory with lots of back slapping.

There are countless instances of pointless kamikaze—yet Leia describes said suicide pilots as being "more interested in protecting the light than being a hero.” According to this logic, once all the Resistance is dead, then light will be restored. The symbolic is more important to the modern individual than survival—let alone winning.

The angst of Kylo Ren, the son of Han and Leia, goes unexplained in The Force Awakens. He seems an emotional wreck, and it's almost laughable how pathetic a character he is. He will never live up to his grandfather Vader, who though evil, was part of the Star Wars equivalent of the greatest generation.

Kylo is not a happy camper.

But The Last Jedi delivers the goods when it comes to Kylo. As it turns out, Kylo Ren is the only dimensional character left in the Star Wars universe. He is the very embodiment of millennial alienation. He rejects the Resistance—the remnants of the neoliberal consensus. This is, of course, because he was violently cast out from the Jedi by Luke. But he also has no loyalty to the First Order—the hawkish neoconservatives. They are but a means to an end.

On one hand, we have Luke expressing his own death drive, "I only know one truth. It's time for the Jedi... to end." For Kylo, the disillusionment is more totalizing. He tells Rey, in trying to sway her, "The Empire, your parents, the Resistance, the Sith, the Jedi... let the past die. Kill it, if you have to." Worded only slightly differently, the necessity of complete annihilation is nonetheless shared.

What in Kylo's life might have led him down this path? Let's review:

His father abandons him for sex & thrills

His mother abandons him for a job

He's "raised" by the Resistance

His first surrogate father, (Uncle Luke) tries to murder him for being too strong—for questioning the Resistance narrative

His second surrogate father (Snoke) constantly mocks him for being a bastard

His mother then sends an orphaned girl (Rey) to murder him

When that proves unsuccessful, his mother sends Uncle Luke to finish the job, and says "I held out hope for so long. But I know my son is gone." This despite Kylo having just saved Rey not a moment before

Authority has long been absent in the entire galaxy, and promises to continue to be under the postmodern and unserious Resistance. But the modernist First Order, while interested in restoration, is equally toothless, and run by fools. In frustration, Kylo commits patricide—murdering Han. And even this turns out wholly unfulfilling. All that remains is narcissistic rage.

My sense is that Johnson is evoking a generational ideological shift back here on Earth in the past several decades. In the original trilogy, we have the archetypal boomers: Luke, Han and Leia; hopeful and naïve, faithful in America's post-war moral hegemony.

By the time the prequels come around, we have the vision of a more pragmatic Generation X—all they dare imagine is a boring galactic parliament featuring aliens from around the galaxy—a veritable Model UN, that so many bright Gen Xers participated in growing up. This Fukuyamaist managerial elite consensus is upset by a rogue plutocrat sith.

And today, all is lost—the millennials are the target demographic, and their utter impotence and dispossession leads them to lash out ineffectually, or sacrifice themselves as pawns for causes that are utterly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Surely Rey and Finn don't see themselves this way, and are meant to reflect the boomer archetype. But there is no actual source for their optimism. Their origins are in isolation and rejection.

Mark Hamill touched on our forays in the Middle East in a recent interview, "You know I thought, we've been in perpetual war, I thought at least after Vietnam we'll never get into another pointless war with no clear objective. We've been at war for 17, 18 years now?" Consequently, Hammil later says quite aptly, “This is not the Luke from the original trilogy. This is the Luke from another generation.”

It makes sense that Hamill is so distraught with Luke’s character arc—Luke is taking on the millennial frame. Hamill is the quintessential boomer—he's not equipped to deal with today's reality—and neither is Luke.

Unlike Hamill, we soon find the Resistance technician Rose, and defected First Order janitor Finn searching for a codebreaker to help them sneak into the First Order's ship for the purposes of sabotage. For their mission, they visit a casino planet, with an attending nouveau-riche clientele. Rose awakens Finn to how the gamblers got their money: "And who do you think these people are?” Camera pan to evil capitalists. “There's only one business in the galaxy that will get you this rich. Selling weapons to the First Order. I wish I could put my fist through this whole lousy beautiful town."

Evil space capitalist.

Shortly thereafter, Rose, Finn and a crew of slave children and alien race horses riot through the city, leaving a modest amount of destroyed property in their wake. We can safely assume that these rich vacationers had insurance, but no matter. Rose and Finn leave the scene with a smug satisfaction in their achievement.

The two end up finding a codebreaker—a Tyler Durden-like cynic. He tells them a much deeper truth than Rose was even aware of. "Let's see...this guy is an arms dealer. He made his money selling weapons to the bad guys. And the good ones. Finn, let me learn you something big. It's all a machine. Live free, don't join."

The same arms manufacturers sold X-Wings and Tie Fighters.

In other words, the same military contractors are supplying arms to both the Resistance and the First Order—not that this matters at all to how Finn or Rose react. They seem not to even have absorbed a single word the codebreaker said—It's lost on them that the entire Resistance/First Order conflict has been entirely meaningless. All their suffering for naught.

And in a matter of seconds, the brief scene becomes a footnote. Exploring this further would utterly humiliate the viewer, for it exposes fans as having invested in the sideshow of Star Wars universe. Hint: for Johnson, the villains were not the flamboyant Sith, but instead the unchallenged galactic military-industrial complex. The "War" in "Star Wars" were always just an externality. There never was a light or dark side. There was only ever power.

The sequels, and in particular, Rian Johnson's latest episode, have now fully deconstructed the Star Wars universe, and shown the characters and their motivations to be vacuous. The only character remaining who really grasped the depravity of the situation is Kylo Ren. Now that there is no hope for heroes (even the Resistance doesn't believe in those anymore—after all, heroism reinforces a hierarchy that must die), we await the climactic explosion of an end to this universe that it deserves.

More likely though, given that we're dealing with Disney, we probably won't get anything of the sort. And for that reason I now realize why fans of all stripes didn't like The Last Jedi. What they saw in the mirror was so horrifically disfigured and alienating that it couldn't be confronted. For though history is far from over, with everyone either too smart to continue living, or too stupid to die, it may be there's no one left with the will to make history anew.

If you enjoyed this article, your patronage and support is much appreciated and will contribute to further pieces.

LTC address: LhtEWZSixf3H3hhiZCpsuXHjwFJrgDrs3j

]]>In Depth Ep. 3: Design Tools—Missing the MarcEli SchiffMon, 30 Oct 2017 06:08:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/10/30/in-depth-ep-3-design-toolsmissing-the-marc54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:59f689b76926700aba3608afWith Dropbox out of the way, this week we have an an episode that's been a
long time coming. Mike and I had the pleasure of talking to a special
guest, Marc Edwards of Bjango, to discuss the state of design tools.
With the announcement of InVision Studio, Sketch Libraries, Framer Export
and Adobe Xd finally coming out of beta, there's more movement than ever in
UI design and prototyping tools. We cover the design systems movement, the
downsides of different business models, and the industry's convergence on a
feature-set that can only be described as 'acceptable mediocrity.'

With Dropbox out of the way, this week we have an an episode that's been a long time coming. Mike and I had the pleasure of talking to a special guest, Marc Edwards of Bjango, to discuss the state of design tools.

With the announcement of InVision Studio, Sketch Libraries, Framer Export and Adobe Xd finally coming out of beta, there's more movement than ever in UI design and prototyping tools. We cover the design systems movement, the downsides of different business models, and the industry's convergence on a feature-set that can only be described as 'acceptable mediocrity.'

A big thanks to our sponsor, The Print Handbook. They understand that what you see on screen is not what you’ll see from the printers. So they made a book to help. It’s full of print examples to get you results. Go to printhandbook.com and use the promo code INDEPTH for a free pack of greetings cards with any order.

]]>In Depth Ep. 2: Dropbox, Not a Literal BoxEli SchiffMon, 16 Oct 2017 05:46:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/10/16/in-depth-ep-2-dropbox-not-a-literal-box54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:59e413429f8dcec5944f9dfbWe want to thank our listeners for the great feedback you had on our first
episode of In Depth. This week, Mike and I are back again to discuss the
"provocative" rebrand of Dropbox. We take a look at the logo (which
allegedly isn't a box anymore), the 259 fonts that make up the "versatile"
Sharp Grotesk family, and the challenges of enterprise companies hiring too
many designers while working with external design agencies with conflicting
incentives.

We want to thank our listeners for the great feedback you had on our first episode of In Depth. This week, Mike and I are back again to discuss the "provocative" rebrand of Dropbox. We take a look at the logo (which allegedly isn't a box anymore), the 259 fonts that make up the "versatile" Sharp Grotesk family, and the challenges of enterprise companies hiring too many designers while working with external design agencies with conflicting incentives.

A big thanks to our sponsor, the team at Smile Software behind TextExpander app. Get more done. Speed through repetitive communication. Customize boilerplate. Great for teams. Try TextExpander free for 30 days.

]]>Announcing In Depth PodcastEli SchiffThu, 14 Sep 2017 14:59:46 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2017/9/14/announcing-in-depth-podcast54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:59ba9112f14aa1f86f66fb1eMike Rundle and I are proud to announce In Depth, a podcast on design and
technology. You may know Mike from one of his many projects, including
Treeo, Filters, his iPhone development books, or perhaps from his
unflinchingly honest Twitter antics.

Mike Rundle and I are proud to announce In Depth, a podcast on design and technology. You may know Mike from one of his many projects, including Treeo, Filters, his iPhone development books, or perhaps from his unflinchingly honest Twitter antics.

We're starting scrappy, and jumping right in, to cover the recent September iPhone X event. And there was lots to talk about. We discuss the new iPhone's screens, hardware, sensors, and also the software, like animoji, Face ID, and most significantly of all, everyone's favorite notch.

Here's a segment from the show:

Eli:

Apple has one patent for bezel-less phones, which may or may not come to be. It seems like a pretty difficult task to achieve. But they also have another patent for integrating camera sensors into the screen itself. So that would invalidate the need for a notch at all. It seems like they’re totally premature in having this ‘success’ language when they haven’t achieved it. They’ve have this really big protrusion into the screen.

Mike:

Yeah this is their “Mission Accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier—the George Bush moment. It’s like they’re afraid to recognize that the ideal state is a big glowing rectangle. I guess It’s just marketing kerfluffery vs. the reality that I can’t imagine any designers or industrial designers think this is the final, ideal state for the iPhone that they won’t deviate from for a decade. Because obviously it’s a compromised design. The notch is all compromise.

]]>Subtraction InterviewEli SchiffTue, 25 Oct 2016 05:04:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/10/25/subtraction-interview54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:580ebba0d2b857255a1921d5I've recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Khoi Vinh of
Subtraction about our shared interest in design criticism. We discuss
everything from my origins to critical discourse and controversy. Head over
and give the interview a read.

I've had the pleasure of being interviewed by Khoi Vinh of Subtraction about our shared interest in design criticism. We discuss everything from my origins, to critical discourse and controversy. Head over and give the interview a read.

]]>Dystopic PipesEli SchiffTue, 12 Jul 2016 07:10:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/7/12/dystopic-postmodern-pipes54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:572adf13e3214012ea2a942cThe fascination with tubes, or pipes, was introduced to the digital realm
with the 1993 release of Windows NT. Included in the OS was what would
become one of its most enduring designs, the "3D Pipes" screensaver, which
would remain in the OS until Windows XP. This hypnotic screensaver was
etched into the minds of everyone who used PCs in those days, at home, at
work or in school.

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The fascination with tubes, or pipes, was introduced to the digital realm with the 1993 release of Windows NT. Included in the OS was what would become one of its most enduring designs, the "3D Pipes" screensaver, which would remain in the OS until Windows XP. This hypnotic screensaver was etched into the minds of everyone who used PCs in those days, at home, at work or in school.

It should be no surprise that today, as a generation of students who grew up with the screensaver are now entering the design workforce, these aesthetics are seeing a resurgence.

Logo variants for Architecture PLB.

This pipes aesthetic has periodically found its way into the broader visual environment, like in the 2012 brand system for Architecture PLB, by SEA Design.

A still from Rafaël Rozendaal's Slick Quick site.

A handful of postmodern designers have used this sort of technique in their designs, like Rafaël Rozendaal, with his 2014 net-art website, Slick Quick.

Yomagick poster designs.

The smooth tubes are often used in print design, like the posters made by Yomagick, and there are other variants, like the bevel and emboss tubes of designer Eric Hu.

Tubes by Eric Hu.

On the whole, pipes have largely stayed a subcultural motif, something you might find on a teenage Tumblr blog, or on a Vaporwave or Seapunk album cover, alongside an ironic marble statue.

Facebook Futures

A mockup I drew of Facebook's new aesthetic, using the Bevel & Emboss style of Hu.

Ever the design powerhouse, Facebook has picked up on the vacuum of postmodern aesthetics and is now attempting to fill it. The chosen delivery mechanism for the pipes is their trendy new chatbot, Facebook M.

Musixmatch and Facebook M.

Facebook M bears some similarity to Musixmatch brand, which was designed in 2014. Musixmatch's logo is quite clever, in that it integrates the "X" and "M" of their name into a monogram. On the other hand, Facebook M's resemblance to an "X" bears no meaning.

Architecture PLB and Facebook M.

Most interesting among the pipes in Facebook M is the exciting new set of emoji included in the app. For the Facebook designers and their project partners at design agency Collins, it was extremely important to provide a new and meaningless emoji for users to grapple with after waiting hours for feedback from the Facebook M bot.

The Facebook M pipe squiggle emoji: with "personality, delight and empathy." (Note: this is real.)

This introduction was quite timely, as studies have shown that the state of communication with emoji is already quite confusing for users. We could surely count on Facebook to escalate that confusion to new heights–in style.

we've been thinking about how to improve M's ability to express personality, delight and empathy. We came up with a new set of stickers - just for M to use - that help amplify M's range of emotion when communicating.

Many commenters were unsure what emotion was being communicated in the spaghetti. Goldberg had his own explanation: "it's for rare times when M experiences some technical difficulties."

But Goldberg appears to be alone in this understanding. Consider what happens when you ask M itself what the emoji means:

There's no specific meaning, just something to share with you!

The team was quite successful in their misdirection–even for M itself, the emoji is devoid of meaning.

M responding to an inquiry about what the emoji meant.

When I posted the icon on Twitter, a reader responded,

I feel stupid though because I don't know what the twisty one you tweeted is supposed to represent.

Silly user! He should have known postmodern aesthetics aren't meant to communicate anything–let alone represent something.

The technorati were quite impressed–they know better. Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia's was quite curious to learn who was responsible for this excellence in design:

Who's idea was this? Genius!

If you are still perplexed at the meaning of the emoji, let alone how a team of internal Facebook designers, a team of agency designers at Collins, a Facebook PM, a director and perhaps an executive let this ship, you simply don't understand the future of design. For how else could it be the dystopian future envisioned by Facebook without the intentional inclusion of meaningless postmodern cliché?

This is how people think of themselves when they make postmodern design. I certainly did when I drew it.

]]>Instagram's Abomination Part IIIEli SchiffTue, 07 Jun 2016 05:12:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/6/7/instagrams-abomination-part-iii54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:56e1165c37013b4b09d97027One of the primary pillars of Instagram's philosophy for their new icon was
an intention to "Honor Instagram’s identity while reflecting its growth."
In the spirit of honoring this heritage, the team first struck off any
possibility of retaining anything even remotely resembling the previous
icon. Then they set about preventing the use of the recognizable Instagram
glyph by Tim van Damme. Their solution: make an icon that requires a
lengthy artist's statement to be understood.

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This is the conclusion to Instagram's Abomination, a three-part series on interface design aesthetics at Instagram. If you haven't already, read Part I and Part II before continuing.

The New Icon

The primary philosophical pillar for Instagram's new icon was an intention to "Honor Instagram’s identity while reflecting its growth."

Left: the original Instagram icon, middle: a rendering I drew with the Van Damme glyph, right: the final Instagram icon with abstracted glyph.

In the spirit of honoring this heritage, the team first struck off any possibility of retaining anything even remotely resembling the previous icon. Then they set about preventing the use of the recognizable Instagram glyph by Tim van Damme. Their solution: make an icon that requires a lengthy artist's statement to be understood.

Let's dive deeper into the team's rhetoric. For Spalter, the intention behind the rebrand was "Designing a New Look for Instagram, Inspired by the Community." He explained, "the Instagram icon and design was beginning to feel, well…not reflective of the community."

Those responsible and not responsible for the Instagram rebrand.

This might be one of the more genius examples of buck-passing in rebrand history. The two-pronged premise goes as follows: first, any complaints about the icon can be taken straight to the greater design community for inspiring the trends that led to their icon. (In some ways, this is an accurate history, if a relinquishing of personal agency.) Second, critics can bring their dissatisfaction to the humble Instagram users themselves. For who else but external designers or Instagram users themselves could be described as "the community?"

According to Spalter, "We started with the basics, removed ornamentation, and flattened the icon." Afterwards, Spalter worried, "these early 'flattening' explorations lacked the visual weight of the original." One has to ask, was he expecting something different?

It is a mystery why Spalter didn't use this icon out of the 300 drafts–it matches the Instagram UI perfectly.

Thus Spalter would begin a lengthy exercise, asking every employee in the "whole company to draw the logo from memory in 10 seconds or less…That gave us a sense of what was burned in." Looking at the results, they found that the main elements people remembered were the lens, icon shape, and the color stripes.

One might have advised Spalter to ask a single designer to use their two eyes to come to the same conclusion for efficiency's sake, saving the company precious man-hours. But designing the icon by committee was a requirement that had to be satisfied.

The glyph they arrived at was a superellipse with an inner stroke, as well as a "dot and circle [to] evoke a smartphone’s lens and light sensor, rather than a Polaroid camera’s lens and viewfinder."

The new Instagram glyph.

Spalter explained the team's choice of this simplistic rendering as being due to a "shift [in] how much photography has changed in the past decade or so." The beauty of this statement is it implies that when Systrom and Rise drew their icons, they were entirely ignorant of decade-plus old smartphone hardware that featured a lens sans viewfinder. Imagine if Systrom and Rise, the fools they were, had been aware of smartphones in 2010–they never would have designed an icon that looked like an instant camera.

A Recent History of Gradients

The most discussed element of the Instagram rebrand was its prominent gradient. Many were quick to exclaim 'gradients are back.' Some went so far as declaring a national holiday to mark the occasion, as if gradients had ever gone away–of course they hadn't.

So where exactly did Instagram's particular blurred gradient come from?

Some, like print designer John McHugh, were quick to claim, "This is what happens when interface designers do branding. Soulless." One might not have expected this proposition from McHugh, given that he has produced work in much the same aesthetic. Moreover, it would only make sense to for McHugh to align himself with the gradients of such an established company as Instagram.

McHugh's gradients for a New Balance campaign.

The problem with McHugh's position is that it's entirely ahistorical. If we look to the origins of the tie-dye gradient aesthetic, it didn't emerge from the interface designers in Apple's Human Interface Group, as McHugh alluded to. While it is true that historical HIG principles held that gradients be used to convey a consistent light source, these new decorative gradients were of a new breed.

It was in fact the print and brand designers in Apple's Marketing Communications group who introduced and enforced the new non-functional gradient aesthetic when they laid the groundwork for iOS 7, with its blurred, 'frosted glass' vibrancy and its neon gradient color palette.

For several years Apple has been raising the bar to the applause of the design community. This is the harmonious color palette used in icon designs on OS X and iOS today.

You can surely hold UI designers responsible for at first passively, and later enthusiastically embracing the garish neon gradient aesthetic, but they did not initiate the trend. Nevertheless, there is one thread that ties much here together. According to Mashable, interface designer Robert Padbury was the "architect" behind the Instagram icon and had also designed for Apple's iOS 7 and Uber's February redesign.

Interestingly enough, not two years before the iOS 7 launch, Padbury proclaimed his love for skeuomorphism, something discussed in Part II. The peer pressure of trends really does change a person.

Apple Music

When Apple announced at WWDC 2015 their new Apple Music and iTunes branding, they introduced a tie dye style that shocked many, despite having already been used in OS branding for some time.

Apple's vibrancy inspired Instagram.

The Verge stretched to justify the seemingly nonsensical blurred shapes as an homage to the original striped Apple logo. Another theory some posited was that the colors were a mashup of the Music, Podcasts and Videos apps.

At the time, I responded to the logic, "This icon only makes sense if you think icon design is making a mush of colors that signify nothing to the audience." And as it turned out, the prevailing mashup theory didn't pan out. The Videos and Podcasts apps were not ultimately integrated into the mobile Music app.

Despite the vibrancy blur turning out to be a seemingly random choice in Apple's case, Instagram would go on to justify its use of the blur in their own icon using the same sort of spurious arguments volunteered by Apple apologists.

Instagram's Gradient

We turned our focus to figuring out exactly what people loved about the classic icon…we knew that people loved the rainbow…Almost all of them drew the rainbow…If the lens is a bridge into the bolder, simpler glyph, the rainbow is a bridge into the colorful gradient."

It therefore made sense to make any connection to that rainbow entirely imperceptible, if it would exist at all.

Left: an image from the new icon's launch video. Right: the colors that Instagram might have possibly sampled from the original icon.

Left: I've illustrated here the illogical construction of the new icon. Right: Some of the colors used do not occur in the old icon as claimed.

Interestingly enough, consider what happens if you stretch their sampling justification to its extreme. When you sample colors from the old icon even from odd places like the lens or viewfinder, you still don't find the same color palette used in both icons. Many of the blurred colors now being used did not occur at all in the old icon. And of those colors that do, only a fraction are from the stripes that users so associate with the Instagram brand.

These colors are not in any way "an echo of perhaps the most beloved part of the old Instagram logo." Nor is it true as Spalter claims that "The rainbow lives on in form of this new gradient." It is clear there was little to no intentionality at all in the icon's palette, other than to offset the reductive minimalism in the app's design.

But before we cast any judgment, we must also consider the argument made by Chappell Ellison, "You know who loves gradients, and decorative text and bright colors? Literally billions of people."

If you put it that way, it isn't so important whether the colors were really sampled from the old icon or whether they're an incoherent mess. The narrative convinced the design community, so that is really all that matters.

Black and White UI

When it became clear that users were revolted by the new icon, apologists had to reconcile this with their own disgust with the art of icon design. How could users possibly prioritize an icon? Doesn't everyone by now know that icons are insignificant drivel? Did iOS 7 not get that through the consumer's heads?

This sentiment was best put by Jared Spool: "At the end of the day, it isn’t the logo that makes or breaks the product or company. It’s the experience the company delivers." In this way, apologists sought to appeal to the broader systems design in the UI, as though it could serve to excuse and invalidate all aesthetic criticism of the icon.

The new minimal white UI.

This paradoxically emerged as its own aesthetic argument, in which industry leaders like Nicholas Felton lauded the minimalist black and white color scheme: "When you use color sparingly, it becomes a tool." The corollary we must assume is that if one uses color liberally, they're doing a disservice to users, who will have little clue as to what colors might mean.

It was strange that places like The Verge and Gizmodo praised the new black and white UI in the most recent version of Instagram, as if it were an utterly new revision to the app's design. If we look to Instagram's recent history, the current iteration of their design is perfectly in line with the philosophy outlined in their iOS 7 UI update in 2013.

Much of Instagram's navigation went black and white in September 2013.

On the release of their iOS 7 UI, the team's intentions were made clear:

Today we launched Instagram for iOS 7! You'll see a lot less chrome, full bleed images, more whitespace…We focused on putting the content even more to the forefront than before.

In the rationale for their 2016 interface adjustment, Spalter outlined the content-first approach:

While the icon is a colorful doorway into the Instagram app, once inside the app, we believe the color should come directly from the community’s photos and videos. We stripped the color and noise from surfaces where people’s content should take center stage…We’ve also refreshed the user interface with a simpler, more consistent design that helps people’s photos and videos shine.

Remember how hard it was to use the Tim van Damme UI for Instagram? You just had no idea where the content was.

One can be forgiven for not noticing the massive ocular burden of the previous overly colorful UI which prevented any photography from being enjoyed.

In Conclusion

It should now be clear the significance of Instagram's change from a dimensional icon to a flat one. This transition served as the final nail in the coffin of a larger paradigm that had existed for decades: an understanding of the value of overt skeuomorphic design.

The resultant Instagram brand speaks to an indecisiveness on the part of its designers. The tie dye gradient colors of the icon and the minimalist palette in the app interface represent the worst of both worlds. In the former, a sort of postmodern nihilism in which 'anything goes.' In the latter, a modernist reduction such that judgment is never a factor. It is a case study in the sickness that is contemporary design.

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]]>Instagram's Abomination Part IIEli SchiffTue, 24 May 2016 11:21:51 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/5/24/instagrams-abomination-part-ii54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:56e115edab48de28c9c6b9faSince Instagram launched their rebrand, there has been a predictable
pattern of people dismissing all discussion of their icon as navel gazing
decadence.

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Instagram's Abomination is a three-part series on interface design aesthetics at Instagram. If you haven't already, read Part I before continuing.

Since Instagram launched their rebrand, there has been a predictable pattern of people dismissing all discussion of their icon as navel gazing decadence.

Instagram changed their logo!!!! THIS MATTERS!!!! IT MATTERS A LOT AND ITS HORRIBLE!!! -Real life people being serious

This type of ignorance is unfortunate when it comes from a layman. But when designers engage in this sort of anti-aestheticism, claiming it drags down the design community, it is completely self-defeating. Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering exposes where this position emerges from:

If you want your stakeholders to stop thinking design is only about aesthetics, stop reacting to the aesthetics of every new design idea.

Whether the news cycle is zero sum is a discussion for another day. But despite designers wishing to suppress criticism and downplay the significance of the icon, the company and its users clearly think otherwise. For my part, I intend to continue to take aesthetics seriously.

Icon History

I compiled this history of Instagram's icon design.

It is a lesser known fact that CEO Kevin Systrom illustrated the first icon for Instagram, directly referencing and cropping the Polaroid OneStep SX-70. Systrom recounted how the cropped icon came to be,

The initial icon was a rendering of an actual camera…At that point, you have to realize, we had 80 users and I really just liked the idea of having a retro camera stand for Instagram.

The Polaroid OneStep SX-70 and Systrom's 1.0 icon (without mask.)

Two weeks after launching the app, Systrom was invited for a feature in the App Store. Things got pushed to the last minute, and Systrom realized he needed an icon that would go beyond the existing Polaroid branding.

While looking through the work of friend and beta tester Cole Rise, Systrom saw a Bell & Howell camera icon Rise had drawn for a personal project. He quickly called up Rise and asked if it would be possible to come up with an icon design for Instagram–but he would only have one hour.

Rise's Bell and Howell icon shares many elements with the Instagram icon–note how the lens and viewfinder share reflections, as well as the icon shading.

Jacked up on "coffee and panic," Rise set about recycling elements from his Bell & Howell icon into the Instagram 1.0.3 icon. After 45 minutes, he delivered, and just in the nick of time.

Rise later consulted with Instagram and the company went on to name the "Rise" filter after him. But more importantly, his icon and its rainbow stripes would capture the imagination of millions in the years to come, even after many revisions and improvements.

ADR Studio's Socialcam concept.

It might not have been the best-executed icon ever drawn, but it was iconic and beloved by many. Take ADR Studio's concept Polaroid Socialcam, which sought to bring the Instagram camera to life.

Every companion or clone camera app that used Instagram's stripe motif–and there were many–served to reinforce its prestige. It only made sense that the modernist Instagram team would seek to dilute that brand value to the point of nonrecognition.

Van Damme's Glyph

The Instagram glyph could be found in the app and around the web.

Beyond the iconic Instagram app icon, one overlooked piece of branding was the 2012 glyph icon by Tim van Damme. In its own way, it was just as iconic as the dimensional Rise icon, given that it was plastered on nearly every site's social media links section, as well as the tab bar in the app.

Some criticized Instagram's removal of the tab bar glyph icon in the latest redesign, but they had already done so long ago. (For the record, the blue affordance did present some usability problems regarding its state.)

Even if Instagram were completely determined to rid itself of all depth, this glyph would have been a great middle ground to maintain their brand legacy while satisfying the modernist requirement for reduction.

Here are some variants I drew of the icon using the previous glyph and brand colors from the app.

Skeuomorphism defined Instagram

Earlier in this series I spoke to a theory that was widely held in the design community. The theory held that Instagram maintained their dimensional icon due to an adherence to a 'principled approach,' which predictably turned out to be false. Yet I never elaborated on what exactly that approach might have been.

Journalism about the alleged loss of skeuomorphism.

When the new icon arrived, there was an undercurrent of discussion about the term 'skeuomorphism' and its apparent newfound absence from the app. Articles claimed Instagram was "saying goodbye" to skeuomorphism. Consider The Atlantic's reporting on the original skeuomorphic icon,

Skeuomorphism is impressed all over its original mark. The pixel-tuned detail, the rainbow flourish, the leather…The new icon, meanwhile, is everything an icon is supposed to be in 2016: flat, minimalist.

The truth is, the Instagram app was and still remains skeuomorphic. It may well be flat and minimal now, but it continues to make reference to the formal and instrumental elements of existing objects, whether they be tools like cameras or artifacts like Polaroid film.

These changes from dimensional to flat interfaces had long been set in stone, ever since 2013 when all app design was flattened according to modernist tenets. Instagram's icon was just a little slow on the uptake.

So what then have we lost in adopting this ideology of flatness? We've lost yet another synergy between the form and content of interfaces. Modernism has instead required that the interface object be abstracted from its instant camera referent, and all other referents. If you ever thought modernist designers believed form follows function, you were wrong.

Editing Jennifer in Paradise in Instagram. This photo was the first image edited in Photoshop. It features Jennifer, the then girlfriend of Photoshop creator, John Knoll.

The hypocrisy of our times is that overt skeuomorphic representation has been arbitrarily confined to content–to the photos we take and the filters we apply to them.

It happened that the artificial filter presets weren't dynamic–a filter looked the same no matter which picture you applied it to. But for users, this was beside the point–there was no arbitrary 'authentic' state to strive towards–they simply wanted to achieve an aesthetic.

If the modern minimalists were consistent, they would advocate Instagram removing the filter functionality entirely, which I should note would not completely remove skeuomorphic reference.

Of course they will not do this, because their ideology is contradictory to its core–their aim is simply to remove artistry in interface design. For what else is Instagram but a final case study in the joys of skeuomorphism, made sterile?

Purposeful Design

To understand why the 'principled approach' theory seemed justified, one has to know what the previous dimensional design stood for in the mental models of users.

Instagram spoke to its intention and purpose at every stage, starting with its icon. And though many minimalists claimed the icon was kitschy due to its overt skeuomorphism, this criticism was misplaced. Its kitsch necessarily came from its referent, the Polaroid camera.

Instagram took the ritual of instant photography, and introduced it to the digital format with the enduring appeal of overt skeuomorphs. Previously with its icon and UI designs, and today only in the photo filters, the software played to a wabi sabi desire to bring meaning to the impermanence of everyday life. In the end, Instagram's "community-driven" decisions make clear it was unaware of the value it offered.

]]>Instagram's Abomination Part IEli SchiffWed, 18 May 2016 10:29:30 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/5/18/instagrams-abomination-part-i54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:573c37ca4c2f8525ea999013Unless you've been living under a rock, you are by now aware that Instagram
has updated their app icon. Since the brand launch last Wednesday, there
has been an explosion of negativity toward the redesign. There was a buffet
of memes about the rebrand, though you've probably seen enough of them by
now. Nearly every designer (and even some non-designers) had a redesign to
share, and that's a great thing.

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Instagram's Abomination is a three-part series on interface design aesthetics at Instagram.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you are by now aware that Instagram has updated their app icon. Since the brand launch last Wednesday, there has been an explosion of negativity toward the redesign. There was a buffet of memes about the rebrand, though you've probably seen enough of them by now. Nearly every designer (and even some non-designers) had a redesign to share, and that's a great thing.

But this has not just been your run of the mill response–it has exceeded the reactions to some of the biggest redesigns in recent times.

The negative backlash might seem odd, given that Instagram's new icon differs little aesthetically from the rest of the icons on our smartphone home screens, most of which were updated back after June 2013 along with the introduction of Apple's iOS 7.

Clearly, the reaction could not be explained away as but 'the shock of the new,' as Armin Vit posited when he claimed "About 75% of the negative reaction will be simply to the fact that it has changed."

I cannot emphasize this point enough–Instagram's designers most assuredly felt they had picked a relatively safe choice.

As such, I was not surprised to receive a deluge of reader requests, eager to get a comprehensive analysis of what was going on behind not just the redesign, but also the reaction.

In response to my predictions in mid-2015 that Instagram would undoubtedly change their icon, some have recently claimed that I "called it," joking that I was like "Nostradamus." As far as I'm concerned, the change was inevitable.

A Principled Approach?

To most, including ardent minimalists, the 2016 icon redesign came as a shock. This view is somewhat understandable, given that the flagship Instagram app icon had not seen a major update in almost five years. Up until a week ago, it seemed the post-iOS 7 window of opportunity had passed for Instagram to change their icon.

Dimensional icons for Tipulator, Skala View and Doit.im.

The most common theory as to why Instagram had retained their dimensional icon was that they were holding to a principled approach. The argument went that they stuck with their icon out of respect for not just the immense brand recognition it had accrued, but also for the aesthetic tradition of dimensionality it emerged from. This was plausible to many, including those who strongly disagree with those alleged principles. After all, Instagram was the only remaining tech unicorn to not update their icon.

On the other hand, there was significant resentment among modernist designers and journalists who felt that Instagram had not sufficiently prostrated itself to the cathedral of modernism. Since 2013, designers and journalists proceeded to shame Instagram for not keeping up with trends. As the whig historians at WIRED put it, "Why the thorough makeover? Because it was time."

This sense of urgency was also strong among designers. Consider the case made by Emanuel Sá, the designer behind UI design tool Sketch, "Instagram new icon is awful but at this point I'll take anything." Sá's is not a unique position. For contemporary designers, having a hideous brand is today more permissible than retaining brand aesthetics that were the height of design technique not three years ago.

Instagram's flattened site chrome.

Astute observers would have noted the mounting evidence of Instagram's intentions in everything from their 2013 flat design to accommodate iOS 7, to their 2015 flattened website, to a scare with the icon I reported on in August 2015.

The Instagram Beta icon.

At the time, designer Jad Limcaco happened upon a hidden icon for Instagram. Minimalists were overjoyed with the icon, but their hopes would soon be dashed as it turned out the icon was simply for an internal beta.

Despite these numerous occurrences, many assumed it was all inconsequential. No matter how the app looked, the icon was still dimensional. But the truth is, the assumption that Instagram had some sort of principled approach to UI aesthetics couldn't have been further from the truth.

This should have been expected. Users be damned, an aesthetic paradigm shift had occurred, and for the overwhelming majority of designers bent on conformity, there simply was no going back.

Constraints on Autonomy

In the aftermath of the launch, legions came to the quick apologetic aid of Instagram designers. Designer Bryn Jackson implored observers to "Have some fucking empathy. Everyone is trying hard." Similarly, Harold Emsheimer recommended that we, "Try to remember there are people behind every design. People that worked long and hard with constraints you’ll never know about." In this case, I will explore some of those constraints.

Instagram joined Facebook in 2012.

If we reason according to parsimony, the most plausible explanation for the delay in rebranding was Instagram's 2012 acquisition by Facebook, which provided just the right amount of additional bureaucracy to slow Instagram's intended modernist redesign efforts.

The premise that red tape delayed the redesign seems to be born out in interviews about the icon process, which reveal that "The team labored over it for nine months."

A selection of the icons Instagram used motion blur to obscure in their icon introduction video.

The team considered 300 icons in all–that's one hundred more than Uber did in their meandering logo design process. According to Ian Spalter, Instagram's Head of Design, the rejected icon drafts shown in Instagram's launch materials were only a "small sample." One wonders, why were hundreds of options even necessary?

The Verge praised the boatload of options produced. Fast.Co reporters too were quite impressed with the array,

After months of design work, they spent months more doing qualitative research into whether people could recognize the icon as Instagram, and to see if it evoked the upbeat chumminess of the old icon—a slow, painstaking process meant to root the entire design in a logic that the entire company could grok.

Perhaps settling on these early solutions would have saved them their "painstaking" process.

More from Fast.Co,

It's telling that the video announcing the new icon is mostly devoted to going through all the discarded icon concepts—a subtle cue to anyone that watches, which says, "Hey, we did a ton of work and this didn't happen by accident!"

When design writer Chappell Ellison confronted the premise of a tweet which mocked the lack of effort put into the final Instagram icon, she wrote in Instagram's defense,

Funny how if someone perceives that a design didn't take much work, it's not good. How do I make something look like it took A LOT of work? Meanwhile, we praise so many industry professionals (athletes, singers, actors, models, dancers) when their work appears effortless.

It turns out Instagram had trapped itself in the case study paradox. They intended to use the redesign case study as an opportunity to show how much work they put into the process, but in the end, the effort in the process was totally incongruent with the impact of the resulting icon–thereby making the icon itself appear that much less impressive.

reminder: a lot of people don't care about making things better. They care about showing how clever they are. Approaching things meaningfully and critically is about genuinely wanting things to be better.

Here, Ellison is unintentionally on to something. Instagram's appeal to cleverness in over the top video introduction was indeed used as misdirection with regard to the icon. Instead of the nine-month process being seen as evidence of the designers' disorganization and lack of agency, it was transmuted into a virtuous example of prolific creativity.

Many more came to Instagram's defense. Square's Design Director, Jonathan Paull, made the following argument: "Can you just not? The Instagram update has been out for a hot sec and had a year of design work put into it. Your shit session is invalid." Funny then that Square would post this later that day:

Paull's colleague at Square, Robert Anderson, had this to say: "Logos are the easiest thing to have an opinion on." Perhaps he is right, we really shouldn't trust our lying eyes.

In a piece that expertly walked the line of Poe's Law, but revealed itself to be absurdly genuine, designer Algert Sula shouted, "The new Instagram icon is genius! And it doesn’t deserve scrutiny." Sula is 100% correct, no logo deserves scrutiny.

Craig Hockenberry of the Iconfactory similarly claimed that those who criticized the icon had a "Total disregard for the process."

Hockenberry's was a timely remark, given that Instagram's Spalter was quite effusive about his feelings on the subjects of micromanagement as it relates to process:

A lot of the process was figuring what to keep and let go…The company had to see that it wasn’t designers working in a corner on whatever they liked.

As is the tradition, "All those [icon] explorations were actually up on the walls all over their office" for all to see and give their two cents–pure design by committee.

Indeed, as many designers themselves will tell you, the worst possible work environment is one in which visual designers are permitted actual autonomy over their domain. One should be surprised the process was stopped at such a low number of icons as 300!

]]>RacemojiEli SchiffTue, 10 May 2016 11:10:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/5/10/racemoji54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:573172bd5559862d9ee7f310The topic of racial signifiers in UI design has been heavily discussed ever
since the introduction of multiple shades of emoji skin tones in 2015 by
the Unicode Consortium.

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The topic of racial signifiers in UI design has been heavily discussed ever since the introduction of multiple shades of emoji skin tones in 2015 by the Unicode Consortium.

Emoji before and after.

Prior to the release, a large subset of the emoji were rendered as phenotypically white, and that was the only available option. In the new ostensibly inclusive set, emoji come in six flavors: a default yellow, and 5 shades of skin tones.

Since the release, we've seen widely acclaimed articles like one by Slack designer Diogenes Brito, in which he recounted using a brown illustrated hand on a Slack promotional graphic, something he initially had some trepidation about.

Brito's brown hand.

In a followup article, Brito discussed the impact of the recently more diverse emoji. According to Brito, many users of diverse backgrounds were ecstatic:

They were appreciative of being represented in a world where American media has the bad habit of portraying white people as the default, and everyone else as deviations from the norm.

Among others, Brito's article inspired KPCB Design in Tech advocate John Maeda to write his own piece discussing the meaning of Asian representation in relation to emoji, with a similar emphasis on the power of defaults.

Yesterday I happened upon a controversial article in the Atlantic by Andrew McGill, entitled Why White People Don’t Use White Emoji. McGill started with the premise that the phenotypically white emoji aren't being used in proportion to what one might expect given the American demography. His secondary headline proposed a theory: "Does shame explain the disparity?"

The results of McGill's dataset on emoji usage

Those who are aware of Betteridge's law of headlines may be tempted to assume an answer here. As the law states, "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

But the problem is a bit more complicated than that. As McGill notes,

This effect may also signal a squeamishness on the part of white people. The folks I talked to before writing this story said it felt awkward to use an affirmatively white emoji; at a time when skin-tone modifiers are used to assert racial identity, proclaiming whiteness felt uncomfortably close to displaying “white pride,” with all the baggage of intolerance that carried.

McGill argues rightly that in opting for the white emoji, a white person is engaging in a sort of affirmative white supremacy. But diving deeper, we must also consider the troubling nature of the yellow emoji.

When white people opt out of [white] racemoji in favor of the “default” yellow, those symbols become even more closely associated with whiteness—and the notion that white is the only raceless color.

Indeed, McGill notes that there is a precedent for yellow being culturally associated with whiteness as can be seen in the popular TV show, The Simpsons.

It follows that in using a yellow emoji, a white person is presuming whiteness as a default, and therefore reinforcing racist prejudice by preferring whiteness to be the default signifier.

Unicode itself refers to the default yellow hand as "white."

It is therefore quite strange that yellow (white) emoji were set as the default, given that not assuming all users to be white was the entire premise behind making the new diverse set of emoji. In this way, the Unicode Consortium's efforts to achieve a more inclusive solution only served to doubly reinforce a racism of defaults.

Some have proposed the solution of simply not including a default. Perhaps the operating system makers could force users to explicitly define their race. But we should consider the situation of those who are mixed-race, for whom phenotypic identification is often problematic.

Moreover, as McGill is clear to note, when whites use the brown shades of emoji, it can be interpreted as an intolerant form of racial appropriation.

It was at this point that the troubling nature of the situation became more clear. It is not simply that it is problematic for whites to use the white emoji, but so too is it racist for them to use the brown shades and the yellow default. In sum, it is racist for whites to use any emoji.

There are two choices going forward: either white users should refrain from using emoji, or an alternative default must be drawn. Perhaps green, blue or purple would be an ideal choice as they don't have racial connotations.

The proper defaults.

This is an example of the meaningful political and cultural dilemmas that designers would not have had to consider 40 years ago. Back then, we had more homogenous societies, so inclusive representation was a less pressing concern. Now, designers must be more considerate and take seriously the power of defaults.

Update

The proposed emoji update.

It appears that just after the publishing of this post, Google proposed a new suite of emoji to promote women's diversity. The designers noticed a growingmovementarguing that female emojis are sexist and harmful to girls. The intersectional question remains, will it be permissible for white women to use the new yellow emoji?

Update II

As noted, there's precedent for yellow being white skin in the Simpsons, where white characters are yellow and other characters are represented with the color of their real world counterparts. What's interesting is that in the show, Asian people are represented as white.

]]>You Could Almost Do Anything Pt. IIIEli SchiffWed, 27 Apr 2016 14:32:07 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/4/27/do-anything-iii54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:5720beb037013b324b539c8fWaving Windows
Microsoft's foray into abstract forward slashes began in February 2012 when
Paula Scher of Pentagram was tasked with the redesign of Microsoft's
Windows brand.
Sam Moreau, the Principal Director of User Experience for Windows
recounted an early meeting with Scher and Bierut:

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This is the third installment of "You Could Almost Do Anything," a three-part series on logo design communication. If you've missed the first or second parts of the series, check them out.

Waving Windows

Microsoft's foray into abstract forward slashes began in February 2012 when Paula Scher of Pentagram was tasked with the redesign of Microsoft's Windows brand.

Sam Moreau, the Principal Director of User Experience for Windows recounted an early meeting with Scher and Bierut:

Paula asked us a simple question, "your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?"

Windows flag logos, otherwise known as "Progress Marks."

Scher had a solid point. Despite the metaphor's legacy, having originated in Windows 3.1 and lasting up until Windows 7, the waving flag was an odd choice. Sure, it afforded the brand the opportunity to display the latest and greatest in graphical effects, but it had no conceptual legs to stand on.

The previous Windows logo (left) and Scher's (right.)

The issue is that despite no longer waving, her resulting Windows logo looked just as much like a flag as did the previous versions. Her intention to remove any reference to flags had fallen flat on its face.

Minimally Microsoft

Enter Andrew Kim, at the time a minimalist young gun. Kim's site is paradoxically called "Minimally Minimal." In other words, according to Kim, the site is the least minimal it could possibly be. But this is the opposite of the case, as the site is actually quite minimal.

Andrew Kim's tilted logo proposal for Microsoft.

If anyone sits still, it is not Andrew Kim. Unlike Moving Brands and Google Ventures, who didn't have the audacity to propose a solitary forward-leaning, future-facing mark outright, Kim would do just that.

Why redesign dessert when you can make a splash in the tech industry by neatly packaging a tilted parallelogram?

In July 2012, following Scher's Windows rebrand, Kim was assigned a three-day school project to redesign a popsicle. Instead, he rebelled and chose to design a conceptual corporate identity overhaul for Microsoft, boldly entitled "The Next Microsoft." In it, he proposed an alternative mark–the "Slate." It was a tilted parallelogram which would, in his words, "deliver the future, today." The "Slate" earned Kim glowing reviews in The Verge, Fast Company and Brand New among others.

I think it’s one of the most awkward-looking logos I’ve ever seen…It just looks very uncomfortable on the device, for example, on a Windows 8 tablet, the home button has to be the Windows logo, and because the shape is so strange, it makes the whole front look bizarre. Because now you're looking at a logo that's in perspective and you're also looking at a device that's in another perspective, there are weird perspective issues coming up. It’s just bizarre to the eye.

Scher and Kim's logos on Windows Phone devices.

Kim's argument is somewhat oddly made given that his "Slate" runs into the very same problems, with an even more stark perspective than Scher's.

The "Slate" in perspective.

The rebrand package Kim designed also included a stab at the Microsoft logo proper. As it would turn out, just a month later, Microsoft revealed their own mark. While a Segoe-based logo could be expected, Kim's modified-Segoe mark was prescient.

Microsoft was impressed, and in 2013 picked up Kim for the Xbox team, compensating him for the parallelogram. Microsoft may yet adopt Kim's tilted concept–only time will tell.

King of the Slash

While contemporary designers compete in vain for the 2021 deadline, one designer beat them all to claim victory. That designer was the late French designer Arnaud Mercier.

A sampling of the many slashes Mercier used throughout his career.

Mercier was so enamored with the slash that he named a magazine after it, Slash Paris. He used them prolifically in his work, including in his own logo.

In Conclusion

For most every designer, the design process involves exploring forms along the spectrum of abstraction and representation. As we have seen, this is true even for the most ardent of minimalists.

Yet for modernist designers, mimetic representation and legible letterforms in execution can only be described as failure, for their ideological essence is a fetish for reduction past the point of absurdity.

Several questions present themselves. Firstly, why do modernist designers feel the need to justify obvious (or should I say opaque) abstractions by appealing to metaphorical significance, where no metaphor still exists? This charade certainly fools no one, except perhaps other designers and obsequious journalists.

Take The Verge's review of Moving Brands' HP logo. The Verge had initially put out a lukewarm article up on HP logo. In the interim, Part I of this series ("You Could Almost Do Anything") was published. Not two weeks after I published my piece on the trajectory of the HP logo, Vlad Savov of The Verge published a masterwork of a puff piece on the Moving Brands HP logo and its "perfection."

The Verge littered their review with HP slogans–as is the standard.

Savov gushed over Moving Brands' "Progress Mark.":

HP's decision to revive the 2011 logo that it initially rejected is a triumph of good taste and sense…It's rare for me to offer any company an unqualified commendation, but in this case, HP deserves it for correcting an old mistake in the best possible way.

[What] stands out for me is its simplicity. But, guess what, that's what we're going to be about — easy to do business with and precise in our work, our engineering and our innovation.

The HP Enterprise "logo."

Shortly after its launch, Bryony Gomez-Palicio of Brand New published a review of the logo:

When I think of enterprise solutions I do picture, for whatever reason, a server rack or some kind of multi-wired machine in some room with its own climate control, so when I see this logo I see an abstract server drive. Despite it being so minimal and possibly meaning nothing, I like it. It's a cool visual gesture.

What I see in front of me is a rectangle with a green stroke. Perhaps Gomez-Palicio and I are looking at something different. Either way, ostensibly Whitman had fully justified the HP mark, so why did Gomez-Palicio feel compelled to invent metaphors where there were none? This compensatory narrative about server rooms shouldn't be necessary.

A second, more important, question emerges–how can non-designers have confidence in minimalists' designs if the designers themselves so clearly don't. How can there be any integrity to glean from–when the designs so readily fail by their designers' own criteria for judgment?

I have a baseline framework for judging a logo’s accompanying artist's statement. This framework has eluded designers for generations, and it goes like this: does the logo do what you're saying it does?

The fundamental contradiction between what the modernist builds, and the justifications he scurries to appeal to, can only be seen as evidence of a subconscious insecurity about the modernist project.

Yet instead of scrutinizing his ideological tenets, the modernist doubles down. Far from embodying the espoused populist and universal ideological tenets, he embraces an anti-formalist, elitist pretension. By design, one must to be in the know in order to comprehend the design's intent.

The truth is, just because "you could almost do anything" doesn't mean you should.

This is the conclusion of "You Could Almost Do Anything." To keep in the loop for more articles, subscribe to the newsletter below.

]]>You Could Almost Do Anything Pt. IIEli SchiffWed, 20 Apr 2016 14:44:26 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/4/20/do-almost-anything-ii54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:5717581460b5e9d889778ebfPart I concluded with Moving Brands' redesign of the HP logo mark.
Undeterred, the agency continued on in their quest for reduction. In their
2014 corporate redesign of DeviantArt, they ennoble the company in the same
mission of "boldly facing the future" by making a similar "Progress Mark"
to the one they implemented for HP.

This is the second installment of "You Could Almost Do Anything," a three-part series on logo design communication. If you've missed the first part of the series, head over here.

Part I concluded with Moving Brands' redesign of the HP logo mark. Undeterred, the agency continued on in their quest for reduction. In their 2014 corporate redesign of DeviantArt, they ennoble the company in the same mission of "boldly facing the future" by making a similar "Progress Mark" to the one they implemented for HP.

Keep Moving

The old and new DeviantArt lockups.

In this case, Moving Brands pushed for more than HP's 13º tilt, opting for the essential 62º angle as it is "a literal representation of their [DeviantArt's] desire to turn the art world upside down." The connection between 62º and "upside down," may be tenuous, but stick with them for a bit.

Moving Brands' trajectory for the HP progress mark.

DeviantArt founder Angelo Sotira explained: "we partnered with Moving Brands, who pushed us further than we ever thought possible." Perhaps it was further than DeviantArt thought possible. For Moving Brands, the new DeviantArt logo didn't go nearly far enough.

A rendering I mocked up of the missed opportunity Moving Brands let pass them by with the DeviantArt project.

Moving Brands had initially drawn an elegant monogram made up of a lowercase "d" and an uppercase "A." But this was deemed insufficiently avant garde, and thus it was necessary to shave off what were apparently inconsequential parts of the letterforms.

On the left are the contours and cropping that led to the final mark. (Using these guides, I've mocked up an alternate version on the right.)

DeviantArt's new and undeniably iconic "Z" with an extended diagonal stroke was truly the only logical conclusion for the team. After all, the company needed to prove itself through an avant garde brand. According to Sotira:

Our world is a prolific orgy of originality where creatives enjoy freedom of artistic expression. We are the deviation of creativity that shatters the confines of expectation.

This 'orgiastic shattering of expectations' extended further. According to Moving Brands,

"Angles within the system are derived from the 62° angle of the symbol, including brand typography and a fully customized iconography set for the website and the mobile app."

Sliced letterforms exposed the rebelliousness of DeviantArt.

This cut-off type is similar to that of InVision's upcoming design-in-tech advocacy documentary, Design Disruptors.

Design in tech, disrupting your reading experiences daily.

On the announcement of the new DeviantArt logo, a copywriter wrote the following:

Another great thing about our symbol is that it can tessellate to form a beautiful pattern. It is particularly powerful because, when the symbol tessellates, it allows the two "A"s to become more clear.

It turns out the patterns make the "A" in the logo more legible.

Somehow, this expert copywriter was able to turn a fault of the logo, its incomprehensibility, into a feature. Except that even in this pattern, only the "A" becomes legible, while the "d" remains obscure. One also wonders how often the mark will be featured in such a context.

The DeviantArt Z

An early draft of the DeviantArt "Z" (left) and the Platzkart "Z" (right.)

Accusations of theft ran rampant. Some believed that Moving Brands appropriated the logo from Russian firm Platzkart. In addition, there was a major outpouring of criticism from within the community.

But the real loser in this story is Moving Brands. They missed a crucial opportunity to implement the pure, unadulterated forward-slash. One hopes that they will succeed in their mission before their 2021 deadline closes. Or maybe they will be beaten to the punch?

Slash Ventures

In 2015, Google Ventures team joined up with the Material Design team to push the envelope on their internal rebrand. Like Moving Brands, Google Ventures is "comfortable with risk." And risk they did with their refreshed logo.

An early proposal for Google Ventures' rebrand.

In the earlier rounds of design, the team came up with an ingenious combination of a circle and triangle, to represent the "G" and "V" in Google Ventures.

At the last minute, they were pushed in a different direction. The resulting logo used negative space in the cut-off 'G' to expose a hidden "V."

The original Google Ventures logo (left) and the final Google Ventures logo (right.)

As we can see, the final mark looks somewhat plain, especially in comparison with the circle and triangle.

The Google Ventures site.

Ultimately, the team opted to make a motif of the forward slash in their logo–and they have been sure to use it in as many places in their brand as possible.

After a few weeks of intense work further refining the GV brand, we decided on a quiet launch. No big press announcement, no fanfare, but instead a simple, low-key gathering around my dining room table on a Sunday night. Why? A new brand is not big news to our audience.

Kowitz gets it. A "Progress Mark" might be revolutionary, but sometimes it's best to sit back and let it make its own whig history.

]]>You Could Almost Do Anything Pt. IEli SchiffTue, 12 Apr 2016 07:10:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/4/12/do-almost-anything54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:56e116dc07eaa058bdb3c85fOne of the central aims of the modern minimalist project is to remove as
much visually representational information as possible, despite the
inherent contradictions that implies for the design practitioner.
Abstraction is one of the primary tools modern minimalist designers
needlessly corrupt in order to prevent meaning from being made of what
otherwise might be communicative visual signs. This preference for
intentional obscurantism brings status to a class of would-be elite
designers and their sycophants.

Divide and execute to become the Caesar of project planning and task management diagramming. Get inShort today!

"You Could Almost Do Anything" is a three-part series on communication in logo design.

One of the central aims of the modern minimalist project is to remove as much visually representational information as possible, despite the inherent contradictions that implies for the design practitioner. Abstraction is one of the primary tools modern minimalist designers needlessly corrupt in order to prevent meaning from being made of what otherwise might be communicative visual signs. This preference for intentional obscurantism brings status to a class of would-be elite designers and their sycophants.

The Bauhaus Bible.

Consider the body of work by MIT Media Lab professor Muriel Cooper, a native of Brookline, Massachusetts and mentor of KPCB's John Maeda. Cooper has long credited her philosophy to the reductive design principles of the Bauhaus school. In fact, she penned what has come to be known by modernist adherents as "The Bauhaus Bible."

In Cooper's words, "My design approach always emphasized process over product." Indeed, this is evidenced in her own body of work.

An early draft of the MIT Press logo, in which the logo's communication was not entirely imperceptible.

Muriel Cooper's MIT Press logo, 1964.

Cooper's most famous design is the printer's mark, or logo, for MIT Press. It was made up of the lower case letters 'mitp,' making up the acronym for 'MIT Press.'

Top: The MIT Press mark. Bottom: a few possible interpretations that might be made by an observer. While at MIT, Cooper led the "Visible Language Workshop." If anything, this logo is the antithesis of 'visible language.'

Cooper made the decision to simplify the logo by arbitrarily omitting all horizontal lines–having done so, the form could just as easily be read as 'imlji,' 'nnlji,' 'uolp,' or 'oulji,' among many other possibilities. By design, the logo cannot stand meaningfully on its own. Strangely enough, this became part of the charm of the logo for those in the modern minimalist establishment, for whom ambiguity is a virtue.

The invisible broken shelf that holds the MIT Press books.

The mark is alleged to represent books sitting on an implied shelf. But if we were to take Cooper's word for the shelf's existence, the letterform-books would end up impossibly descending into the shelf's structure, breaking it entirely.

The criteria for judging the Cooper mark have been made very clear given the explanations provided by Cooper and her biographers. The first order element to make sense of is the letters 'M,' 'I,' 'T,' 'P.' The second order is the bookshelf metaphor. The truth is, the logo fails to communicate either.

You might expect designers therefore to judge the logo as falling flat on its own conceptual terms. But this cannot be accepted. Designers pride themselves on their visual discernment. So they experience an acute cognitive dissonance when happening upon a dubious, yet celebrated logo like Cooper's MIT Press mark.

So in my head I'm like, "the MIT Press logo is the best logo ev-ar." And then I read up and it was done by Muriel Cooper. Yup.

The instinctual response is to justify the apparent consensus. The designer says, "so what if I'm unable to parse both the primary and secondary elements of the logo? It must be the height of excellence, after all, it's in the canon!"

In this way, the true genius of the MIT Press mark is in anything but its formal qualities. Instead, the logo is noteworthy precisely because it has achieved critical acclaim despite, or more accurately, because of its failure to communicate.

The relief one feels after learning of the half-baked conceptual origins of the logo does not come from a sense of discovery and awe, but instead the sense that one is now in on the joke. Few are self-aware about this, and even fewer would ever admit it.

Despite the incoherence of this mark, it nevertheless set the stage for MIT's future brand efforts.

Cooper's Influence

Pentagram's Michael Bierut and Aron Fay led the 2014 identity redesign for the MIT Media Lab. They set out to follow in Cooper's footsteps, using a similar geometric grid, which led to a comparably dense result.

Trying to make sense of these marks can be a task. As with Cooper's MIT Press logo, the marks cannot stand on their own–they must be part of the complete lockup.

It has been said, "it’s a Michael Bierut world after all," which makes quite a bit of sense–Bierut is one of the most highly esteemed living designers of our age.

When asked about the logic behind his designs, Bierut exhibited a commonly held sentiment amongst modernist designers:

As you're acquiring that skill, you're making yourself less normal than regular people. I can see things in typefaces that normal people can't. That's not 'cause I'm better than them, it's because I just have acquired the sensitivity. The sensitivity is helpful for me to do my job, but it's not what regular people need.

I would say that consistency is more important than cleverness. Consistency is actually really hard to achieve. Cleverness is a cheap commodity.

It is Bierut's consistency with Cooper's arbitrary rule-sets that emphasizes the hypocrisy of the modernist mindset. Bierut may well be sensitive to the typographic form, but by adhering to the reductive spirit of the Cooper mark, he exhibits a profoundly solipsistic insensitivity to the needs of his engaged audience.

I don't want to over-emphasize logos in the world. I think that basically if you act with intelligence and integrity and consistency you'll develop a brand, quote unquote…You could almost do anything and make it be ok.

Perhaps Bierut is right, a designer really can do "almost anything" once they accept their role as a mere triviality.

The MIT logo by Tim Blackburn and Matthew Carter, 2000.

Not a decade and a half before the Pentagram design, Tim Blackburn and Matthew took to designing the brand for MIT proper. Blackburn and Carter did still reference the Cooper mark, maintaining a subtractive element, but they bolstered the communication with an application of color. Moreover, they decidedly refused to follow Cooper's rule of eschewing crossbars, and made the "t" look like a "t." In doing so, they were successful at using a healthy amount of abstraction for the context.

Logos for Lip, Mill Design Studio and Michael Paul Young and IEEE.

The legacy of Cooper's mark for MIT Press extends well beyond the halls of MIT. The same anti-pattern can be seen in the logo for French Watchmaker Lip, which broke the pattern slightly by including a crossbar, in Mill design studio, the logo of Michael Paul Young, the Founder & Creative Director of YouWorkForThem and also the IEEE Spectrum.

The logos for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Premium Beat, and Heathered Pearls on the 2015 album Body Complex.

The same modernist minimalist motif has also infected music, in music production and in genres wildly different from each other. For instance, consider Premium Beat The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and ambient chillwave artist Jakub Alexander, who goes by Heathered Pearls, both feature similar indecipherable bars in their logos. It's hardly surprising that Alexander is familiar with these modernist design patterns as he is the curator of the ISO50 music and design blog.

Nevertheless, Heathered Pearls' logo serves a great segue from the static and blunt mark of old, towards an emerging and sharp dynamism.

Moving Brands Forward

To say that the early 2000s were not Hewlett Packard's most stellar decade would be putting it lightly. HP desperately needed a turnaround, and in 2008 they reached out to design agency Moving Brands for assistance with a global rebranding effort. The Moving Brands/HP project was code-named "Dave," after cofounder Dave Packard.

Packard had a modernist forward-looking perspective, and made a deep impression on the Moving Brands team. In fact, one particular quote of his inspired what would become the central visual element of their rebrand, the HP 'Progress mark.' Packard's wise words went as follows: "I suggest we focus most of our time on looking at the future because that's where we're gonna be."

Dave Packard on what to spend your time doing.

Little did Moving Brands and their partners at HP know how prescient the late Packard had been. They indeed should have looked to the future, as the rebrand project would end up taking three years to see the light of day on Moving Brands' portfolio, let alone the eight year wait before the logo mark saw the back of a product, in the 2016 HP Spectre laptop.

In the meanwhile, back in 2011, Moving Brands was authorized to publish a case study on their proposed brand refresh, and it was met with rave reviews, and much disappointment. Armin Vit of Brand New lamented the "bad news" that the logo was "in a sort of brand purgatory." He exclaimed, "I hope this identity changes in full. A lot of work and thinking has clearly gone into it."

Let's explore some of that deep thinking.

Inspired by the future-focused Packard, Moving Brands noted the following:

The first step in transforming HP was to define a strong, authentic story. A story that would embrace the proud heritage of a Silicon Valley pioneer but lean forward to the future.…the business had lost its forward-leaning culture, and the once iconic brand was deemed 'dull' and 'lifeless.'

Moving Brands' solution to this travesty was their tilted "Progress mark" which would serve as an articulation of "Human Progress."

The 'Progress mark.'

Furthermore, they aimed to give HP a "leaning forward attitude." The brand materials went so far as to display people literally leaning forward, just like Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal.

Moving Brands justified the use of a particular tilt: "13° represents HP as a company, ingenious in spirit and optimistic for the future." This choice should, of course, be immediately obvious to most of us.

In this Moving Brands graphic, it is proposed that there is a simplification inevitably coming as humans approach the 2021 HP-branded singularity.

Moving Brands even proclaimed that there will be a deterministic progression from the original HP logo, produced in 1941, to the 'Progress mark' to an eventual logo of "ultimate simplicity" arriving in approximately 2021, when the public should be mature enough for such a mark.

The strangest thing to consider is the familial likeness of the Progress mark to Muriel Cooper's MIT Press mark. HP's 'Progress mark' does effortlessly supplant Cooper's mark in sheer dynamism. Still, it suffers from the same ambiguity, and can just as easily read as "bp" or "lip."

The HP and Dynac/Dymec logos.

One should note that there was a time during which HP intentionally made a reversible logo. In 1956, the Dynac company was spun off (later renamed Dymec) by HP employees, with HP ownership. They drew the reversed logo so that the design could do double duty, signifying "d," and "y" as well as "h," and "p."

The Dymec Redwood building.

Bill Hewlett explained, "Dymec was in one building and HP in the other." This was done because "they had the logo in the middle of the floor so as someone came in one direction it would say hp and from the other direction it said dy."

This is quite a sensible rationale for their former logo. However, not only does the new abstract logo break this entire history, but it adds even more potential readings of the logo.

Other brands do not suffer from ambiguity when the lids of their laptops are closed.

Worse yet, it finds its first implementation on the HP Spectre notebook. One wonders how it escaped the designers at Moving Brands that so very often when notebook laptops are closed, it's difficult to tell down from up. This isn't so much a problem for competitors Apple and Microsoft. But with HP's Progress mark, one might well read "dq," or "dairy queen," on the lid.

The previous HP logo.

One would be hard pressed to find something particularly unappealing about HP's previous logo mark. Yet we must always have 13 degrees of progress.

Update

Just found this illuminating breakdown of the Moving Brands process on the HP "Progress Mark."

Update II

]]>Assorted ApplesEli SchiffThu, 10 Mar 2016 08:05:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/3/10/assorted-apples54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:56e0dd5e22482e207bc97b68iPad Drag and Drop
In recent months, many have called for a renewed emphasis on the iPad
platform in the hopes that with further refinements it might become a
replacement or worthy supplement to the OS X desktop paradigm.

Divide and execute to become the Caesar of project planning and task management diagramming. Get inShort today!

iPad Drag and Drop

In recent months, many have called for a renewed emphasis on the iPad platform in the hopes that with further refinements it might become a replacement or worthy supplement to the OS X desktop paradigm. In his 2016 WWDC Wish List, Steve Troughton-Smith noted that one of the crucial features still missing is a system-wide drag and drop:

With the addition of split-screen multitasking, much has been said about drag & drop on iOS. It seems like an obvious thing to add, on the surface, but when you think it through there are a lot of ways it could be detrimental to the OS. Finding a way to enable drag & drop without screwing over all the existing gestures in the OS, whilst still making it faster than copy/paste - that’s not as easy as you think. Despite that, I do think it’s worth figuring out, and makes so much sense on a touchscreen with its direct manipulation model.

Split View on iOS.

It has long been known that iOS features drag and drop functionality, notably on the home screen for app icon arrangement. This is ultimately about adjusting the interface.

Drag and drop in the iOS Mail header fields.

But just the other day while adjusting the addresses in the iOS Mail app, I came across what might be the direction Apple takes for direct manipulation of content itself through drag and drop. If this interaction is expanded to the whole OS, it could be a huge boon for mobile productivity. As Troughton-Smith points out, it will have to be introduced thoughtfully.

Improving Control Center

I previously noted that it seemed like a severe oversight that the iOS Control Center didn't allow users access to many primary system toggles that were being introduced. This became significant for me with the introduction of Low Power Mode, which can be a real life-saver with a phone more than a few months into contract.

This past week, I was reminded of the mockup I drew several months back of an improved Control Center when I saw an excellent prototype made by Sam Beckett. Talk about high production value. Apple would be making a big mistake by not promptly snapping up Mr. Beckett.

While Beckett was quite thorough in his design, one element that he and Apple haven't addressed is creating an explicit delineation between the top row and the bottom row of Control Center buttons and icons.

The current Control Center.

As it stands today, the top row of circular buttons indicates a consistent pattern of displaying mode toggles for the operating system, whether it be for Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Do Not Disturb etc. The bottom row has the traditional app icon mask, indicating that it is appropriate to display app shortcuts in that area. This pattern is largely followed except for the placement of the flashlight toggle.

This was my proposed solution to the current ambiguity around placement of toggles and app shortcuts. Note that the flashlight has been placed in the toggle area and the app shortcut for the Wallet app has replaced it. Additionally, if no labels are to going to be on by default, then tooltips should display on press. Spillover toggles and apps that wouldn't fit in the screen area could be scrolled into view.

While it would be one more glyph icon for designers to draw, in addition to the recommended eleven app icon sizes, the proliferation of third-party app shortcuts could prove useful.

All this attention being showed to Control Center reminds me of the jailbreak theming days when people used the tweak SBSettings to enable toggling of system settings.

Fences on Apple Watch

As users get considerably more apps on Apple Watch, it could be useful for Apple to include a Fences-like feature for grouping them. I drew this quick mockup to show how fence groups might work on a future version of Apple Watch

Behind the Scenes Icon Design

It's always a nice treat to get to see the evolution of icons and glyphs in app design.

Here are the drafts for the new Night Shift feature for Control Center that have been constantly changing prior to launch. It must have been tough for the designers to pick which glyph to go with as each has its own appeal.

Apple News' second iteration seems more appropriate in that it makes better skeuomorphic reference to the traditional form of newspapers, but loses some of the character of the original approach.

This Iconfactory-designed icon for David Barnard's unreleased WikiPro app had never been revealed until recently. It's too bad the app never saw the light of day.

From its Iconfactory origins to its current unfortunate state, the Textsoap icon has gone through some significant revisions over the years. The second version really knocked it out of the park.

Similar to the Textsoap icon, Apple's Numbers icon has gotten blunted since OS X Yosemite. Nevertheless, the Numbers icon has always fascinated me given that it is one of the only icons on OS X to have its own unique perspective.

The Preview app glyph for highlighting has an incredibly clever use of gradients that's subtle but effective. This is the kind of icon artistry that we simply don't see anymore. Here I've exploded and redrawn the icon to show its detail.

Entropy

The branding for Apple's operating systems over the years. This is what aesthetic degeneration looks like.

Steve Jobs, Son of Man

Back in 2012, Joost van der Ree made this under-recognized wallpaper interpretation of Magritte's Son of Man by mashing it up with Steve Jobs. You can download the wallpaper here.

]]>Uber's Atomic MeltdownEli SchiffTue, 16 Feb 2016 08:30:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/2/16/ubers-atomic-meltdown54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:56c2d4d64c2f85327914f331Most of us have come to accept the new Uber redesign as normal–after all,
it has been a whole two weeks since its reveal. Nevertheless, it is well
worth examining this prime example of both design and managerial
dysfunction.

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Most of us have come to accept the new Uber redesign as normal–after all, it has been a whole two weeks since its reveal. Nevertheless, it is well worth examining this prime example of both design and managerial dysfunction.

The justifications for the Uber redesign were many, the primary being a matter of improving the company's PR. It is widely known that Uber is publiclystruggling with the visibility that comes with unicorn-level success.

Uber frames it slightly differently. According to the Wired report, Uber has in recent years "matured" and now offers UberX, UberCommute, and UberPool, which they describe as "egalitarian offerings." People apparently need to see the new and improved Uber, so a redesign was determined to be appropriate.

Uber's CEO, Travis Kalanick, is in many ways emblematic of what critics of Silicon Valley deride most about tech. The writers at Wired, whose ostensible mission was to promote him in their puff piece, could not help themselves but accuse him of being a "rich, white guy in California." They even described him as "elitist" to boot. This perception had to go, especially given that Uber is a mature and egalitarian company.

This purple pimpmobile easter egg is probably not helping get rid of the billionaire playboy reputation.

Kalanick further explained the necessity to rebrand: "Have you ever looked at someone’s hairstyle and thought 'oh my, you peaked in the 1990s?' Well that’s a bit how I feel about Uber’s look today." Kalanick is hardly the only one who thinks that brands over three years old are 'outdated' and require an exorcism.

As you will come to see in this exploration of the Uber brand rollout, Uber's redesign contained an unprecedented level of micromanagement of the design team by Kalanick, for whom it was a personal passion project.

Countless themes were explored by the team, each clashing with the previous one. Take Kalanick's description of the brand as "at once more grounded and elevated," a contradiction in terms. Perhaps this is an allusion to their 2011 redesign in which Kalanick questioned: "Is it luxury? Well, not quite, but maybe 'grounded' luxury (you get it? 😉), or what I call 'vulnerable luxury.'" You can be excused for not understanding what any of this means.

The promotional video told Uber drivers they can look forward to finding new jobs.

One cheery theme Uber promoted was the upcoming obsolescence and unemployment of all Uber drivers due to automation and driverless cars.

Uber moms and Uber cats were present in the promo video. It appears that their responsive design is broken.

Uber appealed to their audience's affinity for their mothers, and cute animals like cats and dogs. The implication of this marketing is that anyone who loves moms or animals will also love Uber.

Kalanick's Facebook profile.

This cute marketing is not a one-off gimmick for Uber. Pando reporting found that "Leading up to the Super Bowl, Uber’s Twitter feed was all puppies." Kalanick's own Facebook profile picture is of Uber puppies on demand.

Indecision

The team admitted that it took them eighteen grueling months to come up with the brand's core values. That should have been a warning sign. But for Kalanick, the time flew by. Kalanick reminisced about the experience, "This change didn’t happen overnight, but it sure feels like it did." One can be sure that Uber's Design Director, Shalin Amin, and the team would disagree with Kalanick on that. Indeed, Amin explained that he "basically gave up understanding what your [Kalanick's] personal preference was."

It remains unclear why Uber allowed Wired to publish this statement, but it is telling: "Truth be told, Amin and Kalanick didn’t fully understand what they were trying to do."

In general, it is not a great idea to put the brand of a company valued in the tens of billions of dollars in the hands of people who readily admit they don't know what their own intentions are.

Uber tore through and rejected the proposals of half a dozen external agencies and eventually made the decision to rebrand internally. From Wired:

Kalanick is not a designer. He’s an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by nature. Yet he refused to entrust the rebranding process to someone else…he studied up on concepts ranging from kerning to color palettes. “I didn’t know any of this stuff,” says Kalanick. “I just knew it was important, and so I wanted it to be good.”

The revised logotype.

On the logo alone, a designer from Google was brought in to make over 200 variations–and despite that extensive process, the logo was picked impulsively by Kalanick during a design review. According to Amin, "The design review took ten minutes. He [Kalanick] was like, 'that's good.'" Talk about efficiency.

The Uber brand guidelines were sure to make clear that they doesn't want their logo to be urinated on or to be associated with condoms or sex. Because there was a real danger that might have happened.

Bits and Atoms

Bits and atoms from Uber marketing.

The primary two metaphors for Uber, outside of cats, dogs and moms, were the bit and the atom, which Amin saw being represented best by a square and a circle.

These abstractions may seem unrecognizable to your average user, but for Uber, they were profound. The argument goes that Uber, being an app that connects both meatspace and cyberspace through the car and app, should eschew more recognizable metaphors like cars and hood ornaments, in favor of bits and atoms. Perhaps the thinking over at Uber is that the drivers and passengers are as significant as bits and atoms are small.

The bit makes for a great favicon, and reminds us of the great work of early modernist painters. Left, Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915. Right, Uber Favicon, 2016.

Of all the brands based on squares, Uber's is the most exciting.

The Icon

While the logo is important in its own right, the touchstone for Uber users is undoubtedly the app icon. It is the app icon that people see on the dashboard stickers when they walk outside to get in the Uber cars. Despite their previous icon not being particularly inspired, it was straightforward and recognizable.

The Uber icon trajectory on Android and iOS. It took some digging to find all these assets.

For Amin however, this clarity in their previous icon presented 'major problems': "the company had two logos—one with a U inside a box on the Android app, and one with a U and no box on the Apple app." Amin knew that the U just had to go.

The team went on to sketch hundreds of icons–forcing Amin to convene an icon design retreat at his house for an entire week. According to Wired, "He challenged the designers to develop not just an image, but a concept. Anyone can draw an icon, he told them. What’s the story behind it?"

It is no wonder the icon design process was a major source of frustration for the team–Amin had a complete lack of respect for the craft. It is demonstrably untrue that "anyone can draw an icon" as Amin says. If that were the case, it shouldn't have taken his team hundreds of iterations to realize that you are generally better off doing some conceptual research before you put pen tool to canvas.

Animation to the Rescue

The team's fatigue around the icon was finally solved with the magic of animation by designer Bryant Jow, who "went home and began animating the shapes." When he returned the next day, he "presented the idea to Kalanick, who loved it."

The final icon.

Uber offers a profound lesson for all designers–if your client or boss will not budge on a particular design, assume they are a drooling idiot–animate that graphic and they will instantly be hypnotized into approving it. You will be seen as some sort of creative genius, despite the fact that 99% of the time the graphic in question will be seen by users in a static form.

Drivers and Passengers

The iconic U icon is not something trivial to be discarded on a whim. When used as a sticker on the outside of an Uber vehicle, it needs to be totally visible in all lighting conditions. Unlike a marked taxi cab where there is a sense of safety, getting into a stranger's car requires users to have some sort of overtly legible marking that indicates security. This oversight is a massive failure that affects Uber's customers. But it also affects the drivers. If a passenger cannot find the car, that is lost gas, money and time for the driver.

For Amin, none of this mattered. When asked why the Uber U on the icon was abstracted, he made the following argument:

@dustin great q. We certainly explored that but creating an icon that was based on an English character didn’t make sense for a global brand

This should be a wake up call to all international companies: ignore that English is the lingua franca of the world. Accordingly, banish all references to the Roman alphabet in your branding.

Multiculturalism Chic

Despite making progress on the logo and icon, the team still found themselves at a standstill due to Kalanick's shifting sensibilities. According to Wired,

It felt wrong for Uber’s global and local brands to revolve around the color preferences of a rich, white guy in California—even if that rich, white guy in California is the CEO. “We walked out and we were like, this is crazy—we’re designing a brand for Travis,” says Amin.

A brilliant idea hit Amin–what better solution to their PR problems than to invoke multiculturalism? Amin immediately set out to "celebrate the people, cultures and the cities we serve." The team would do this by designing unique color palettes for each region that Uber operates in.

We want people around the world to feel like Uber was born in their city, so a conventional brand system simply won’t work. You can’t have the same look and feel in Chengdu as you do in Charleston and expect to be embraced by both cultures.

The team has doubled down on this beautiful concept, as evidenced by their press release, "Every city has its own character and our long term goal is to have unique designs for cities as well as countries. This will mean adding hundreds more color palettes and patterns overtime [sic]."

Sure, this ploy might add an enormous weight to the clearly stressed design team, but you really can't argue with diversity. I, for one, look forward to the new trend of brands adopting patterns from around the world. It is 2016 after all.

FITC Animation

Stills from the FITC titles on left, from the Uber reveal on right.

The virtues of animation are unparalleled in making a convincing rebrand. Near the end of the process, Uber realized that they just did not have enough visual material to work with, so the team reproduced, sometimes frame by frame, the animations designer Ash Thorp and his team had developed for the FITC Titles project. Thorp, informed me that "Uber never contacted me, consulted with me or paid me."

More stills from the FITC animation on left and from the Uber reveal on right.

Silencing Criticism

It wouldn't be a public design discussion without an associated anti-think piece, which seems to conveniently crop up every time a new corporate redesign emerges. These articles implore designers to close both their eyes and their minds and to never criticize design.

I always aim to acknowledge excellence in anti-think piece writing. This time, we look to an article courageously penned by designer Justin Mezzell.

In this instance, apologizing for Uber's rebrand, Mezzell told would-be critics the "7 Things You Can Do Instead Of Ripping Apart A Logo Redesign You Didn’t Have The Brief On." In this title alone, he's exhibiting the classic appeal to context. Obviously designers have no right to comment unless they were in the room with the Uber designers during the design process.

Mezzell seems to have a pattern of writing such pieces, his last was entitled, "Let Bad Work Worry About Itself."

Takeaways

All in all, it is remarkable that the Uber team produced what they did given the circumstances–truly a testimonial to the patience of Uber's Design Director Shalin Amin and former Head of Design, Andrew Crow, who not so inconspicuously departed the company immediately after the redesign.

One would hope that the integrity of design teams is not often compromised as it was here. Unfortunately, Uber's redesign is in many ways just a slightly exaggerated example of the way design is handled more generally. By trying to be everything to everyone, Uber has lost its recognizability as a brand.

Update 4-16

Historical marks similar to Uber's new glyph.

There have been some historical marks similar to Uber's, notably one mark for Carl Cristiansen Construction Co. by Werner Hartz and another for the State Bank of India by Shekhar Kamat (1971). In the case of the Carl Cristiansen glyph, the orientation at least makes some sense. It can be read as a "C" (which could stand for "Carl," "Cristiansen," "construction" or "company." For the State Bank of India, the mark apparently signifies a keyhole. But any design expert will tell you they are both hardly recognizable in comparison to Uber's bit and atom glyph.

Moreover, The overlap with historical marks is to be somewhat expected given the banal shapes involved. What is somewhat more interesting are the similarities between Uber's mark and two modern counterparts closely related to Uber itself.

The Spot icon and wordmark.

The first notable overlap is between Uber and Spot. Spot's glyph features a map pin, which is particularly evocative when placed in the wordmark.

Strangely enough, Spot and Uber have a shared lineage–they both are part of startup incubator/VC Expa, which is run by Uber co-founder, Garrett Camp. One wonders why Camp didn't let Uber know not to launch a glyph on their icon that was almost identical to Spot's. Surely Camp was notified about the launch ahead of time.

The glyphs for Ash Thorp's Collective Podcast and Uber's icon.

It also turns out that there are striking similarities between Uber's glyph and the glyph for The Collective Podcast. This host of the podcast just so happens to be Ash Thorp, the designer responsible for the very animation that Uber had so flagrantly aped.

]]>Social Media WhitewashEli SchiffTue, 09 Feb 2016 08:02:00 +0000http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2016/2/9/social-media-whitewash54bb4cfce4b045585ada36f7:54bb4d6ce4b0ff95698dffd8:56aaccd2c2ea51cb59322f97This week is all about social media, starting with Twitter. Twitter has
been undergoing some significant struggles in the past several months. Most
will remember the hearts fiasco, which seems to have blown over in recent
months. Let's see how Twitter Design has been tasked with fixing the
company.

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This week is all about social media, starting with Twitter. Twitter has been undergoing some significant struggles in the past several months. Most will remember the hearts fiasco, which seems to have blown over in recent months. Let's see how Twitter Design has been tasked with fixing the company.

Twitter recently flattened their iOS icon with a more saturated blue. You can expect there to be a white icon very soon.

Tweetie Twitter for Mac as it Might Have Been

The original Tweetie for Mac and a conceptual rendering I drew.

A new version of the Mac Twitter app was released with a dark theme, but many in the community were less than impressed. Above I've drawn a glimpse at how Brichter's Tweetie icon might have looked today in an alternate timeline.

Twitter for iOS Goes White

It's strange for Twitter to offer a dark theme, considering how just a few months ago they were touting the "cleaner and simpler" Twitter for iOS (see video tweet above.) Twitter Design described their thought process: "Sometimes to enrich we must subtract all excess, meet lighter Twitter!"

You might think this compromise is strange, given that white toolbars all but bleed into the adjacent white table views, distracting from content that designers argue is so very precious. But fret not, the reduction in visual weight far outweighs any associated costs in legibility and hierarchy.

Responsive and Mobile First

During the Apple Special Event in 2012, Tim Cook lauded the superiority of iPad-specific adaptive designs of Twitter.

Cook explained:

This is the Twitter app on a Samsung tablet running on Android. You can see it’s pretty basic. It kind of looks like a blown-up smartphone app. That’s because that’s exactly what it is!

2012 Twitter on Android.

He continued:

Compare that to Twitter running on iPad. You can view the tweets, you can see web pages, photos and videos that are mentioned in the tweet on the big, beautiful screen.

2012 Twitter on iPad.

Cook explained that for badly adapted designs,

It looks like a stretched out smartphone app. Lot's of white space, tiny text, it's kinda hard to see…[good iPad apps are] clearly designed to take advantage of the large canvas. This is a key reason why momentum on iPad continues to build and the competitor's tablets aren't gaining traction.

The iPad Pro's lackluster launch just might have to do with the dearth of apps focusing on adaptive and custom designs, Twitter being among them. One wonders if iOS 7 had anything to do with this.

Twitter's New Responsive Design

How Twitter idealized their responsive iPad update.

The Twitter for iPad actually looks reminiscent of the old Twitter for Android, set in white. It has tons of useless white space, the very thing that Cook chastised not three years ago. Today in iOS 7, it's a virtue.

Previously, Twitter for iPhone and iPad offered very different experiences. Now, Twitter apps on these devices will be more consistent regardless of which one you’re using…Adaptive UI encourages us to be strategic and invest where it matters most.

Perhaps Tim Cook should offer his friends at Twitter some of the sage advice on designing for iPad that he's forgotten in the years since 2012.

YouTube

YouTube's white icon.

Similarly to Twitter, Youtube has removed the awkward bevel on their red icon and replaced it with a white background.

Instagram

Directions Instagram is exploring in their icon design. (Far right is a speculative rendering I drew based on their suite of apps.)

Many protested Instagram not having updated their iOS icon for iOS 7. They did indeed update it, just not in a noticeable way.

Nevertheless, this past June, I predicted that Instagram would further update their icon, giving them three months to put out a new version. Wouldn't you know it, but three months later, a beta icon for internal testing was leaked into the wild.

Instagram beta icon.

If not for the icon remaining internal (for now) this new icon would have been a prime candidate for the Icon Design Awards. On top of that, it would be a great example of branding for a $35 billion dollar company.

Hipstamatic icon.

After all, it is extremely important to their bottom line that they be more minimal than their competitor, Hipstamatic.

Kimoji

Kimoji icon modification.

Last but not least, it wouldn't be an article on social media without discussing Kim Kardashian. When Apple forced Kimoji to modify their app icon, many guessed it was prudishness on Apple's part that caused them to take the app icon down. In truth, they simply couldn't handle the dimensional design and gloss on Kim's butt.

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